How To Get a Job At a Mega-Corp

Barence writes "'With the economic hangover starting to wear off, the technology giants are once again recruiting in earnest. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have vacancies on their websites, and now could be the perfect time to land a job at one of computing's biggest hitters.' PC Pro talked to people inside Microsoft, Apple, and Google to discover how to track down the best jobs, and what it takes to get through the arduous selection and interview processes." With lots of experience both within and without, what other words of wisdom can be offered to those wishing to break into a mega-corp?

Comments

Freelance decker

[WilyCoder]

I'd much rather be a freelance decker than work for a megacorps...

Re:Freelance decker

[Hurricane78]

I worked at a pretty big corporation. And I’ll never do it again.

The simple reason it, that humans are not made for such big social/power structures (yes, that counts for countries too). And the reason for that is, that above a certain number, most of the other people in the group become faceless entities. Which means certain social feedback mechanisms are missing.

Think about what a person in a 30 people tribe (or your group of friends and family) can do and not do, versus what someone in a 300,000 people corporation can do and not do, and you know what I mean.

This mechanisms get replaced by endless meetings over meetings about meetings, micromanaged policies, and people who are banned from having any personal interest in the company as a whole, because they can’t control its direction at all. (Or at least never see an effect.) So they mostly end up doing it for the money. Passively.

While the bosses, having to become experts in management, and lacking proper feedback from their employees (including what’s a bad idea), then make bad decisions.

Now I’m of course not saying that this is always and without exception the case. (Only stupid people are talking in absolutes, or think by default that others do.) But that is the only result that fits with all experience I got, be it first, second or third hand.

In my eyes, those companies are always already dead. The only reason they still are still moving, is their giant inertia. Like a supertanker needs 10 nautical miles at full speed backwards, to get to a halt. Like a giant dinosaur, that takes half a year to completely cool down to ambient temperature.

Re:Freelance decker

[plover]

It's also really good advice :D
I've worked for megacorps for over 15 years. It's soulless.

I'm not quite sure I agree with your soulless comment. I've been at a Mega-Corp for almost 25 years now, and I really still enjoy my job. I got lucky when I was hired, and got in with a development group that has always had work to do. I also got lucky and worked for a pretty good boss for the first 8 years (he knew how to shield his people from crap.)

Since then I've had bosses who range from follow-the-3-ring-binder-plan type to some who have more of a sense of humor. Managers have come and gone as they follow the corporate advice to "move around to get ahead", and there's a definite correlation between the ones with longer tenures being the most effective. And I've had co-workers ranging in talent from "So, wet paper bag, you've thwarted me once again, but next time I shall escape!" to "Rock Star!" (seriously, he's a wicked fine coder AND he plays guitar in a metal band.)

So why do I stay? I *choose* to enjoy it. If I chose to hate it, I would hate it, and it would suck, and I'd leave. Instead, I have a very positive attitude about it. Life is too short to work at a job I hate, and if I didn't have an income the rest of life would be pretty damn hard. So if I have something I like to do, something I'm good at doing, something I choose to find rewarding, and I get paid to do it, well that's a winning hand. I'm deliberately going to appreciate it.

Sure, not every day is great, and there are corporate tragedies and comedies, and sometimes the penthouse office gets a bee in their bonnet and hands down their stupid ideas that if we just had one more re-org, everything would be all better; but that's all noise I simply choose to ignore. Let the managers run around all panicky about how many people they will or won't have after their re-org. I don't care. At the end of the day, I'm still doing basically the same thing; maybe for a different boss, but that's almost an inconsequential detail.

Soul exists only when you put it there yourself. And sure, I know it'd be damn hard to remain positive if I worked under a smothering micromanager, or a screaming executive director. But if you report to someone who's fairly reasonable, the only reason you can't thrive is your own choice.

Slashvertisement?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only skimmed the first and second pages, I didn't want to wait for all five pages to load.

What I gleaned from those two pages though is that large companies have job postings on their web sites. What a breakthrough! Who would have guessed this?

Re:Slashvertisement?

[Austerity Empowers]

I'd say the flaw in the article is lack of comprehension or explanation of the hardest part of megacorps. There are many ways to find job postings, and no shortage of advice on interviews. The hardest part of getting employment at ANY of these companies is getting the screening phone call. Before that, maybe there's some magic in a good resume, or magically selecting exactly the right words for the resume, or I dunno what I never figured it out. In my experience: knowing a guy on the inside is really the #1 best way of getting in, that job postings are fulfilling legal requirements but not entirely the right way in the door.

Speaking for myself, I am offered 100% of the jobs that I even get a phone screen for. I am given a phone screen for perhaps less than 5% of the jobs I submit a resume to. So the real trick is figuring out how to bypass that big brick wall of HR resume screening.

Why would you want to?

[infinite9]

With lots of experience both within and without, what other words of wisdom can be offered to those wishing to break into a mega-corp?

You'd better be young, idealistic, without a family, and willing to trade your life for your job. Some large trendy corporations might not be like that (yet) but the vast majority of corporate america is a slave labor camp. My advice is to stick up for yourself and don't let anyone take advantage of you, because they will if you allow it. Overtime is for emergencies, not business as usual. And emergencies had better not be business as usual. If you think working 50 or 60 hours a week and foregoing vacation is normal or "necessary in today's world" stop it. Just stop it. Life is not all about working.

Those positions have always been there.

[BitZtream]

Uhm, the three companies you mentioned have had job offers up the entire time of this 'economic hangover' has existed.

You get in the same way people have ALWAYS got in. A friend on the inside or dumb luck.

The friend on the inside helps you bypass retarded HR people, otherwise you have to rely on dumb luck to get past that particular part of the process. After that, you just need to actually have a clue and fill their needs for them.

I've never had to deal with retarded HR in my career, luckily. Every job I can think of having, I got because I knew someone that worked there. In fact, thinking of all the people I know closely, I don't know of anyone right now (with the exception of a google employee friend, which I don't think knew anyone before hand) who got their job without knowing anyone at the place.

Re:Get bought out by them.

[Lonewolf666]

If you have a company that is a buyout target:
Only sell out if there is enough $$$ in it that you don't have to keep working there. Maybe stay for another 6-12 months to ensure a smooth transition, but then get lost. Of course, very few posters here actually have a company that might get bought...

Re:Why?

[b4dc0d3r]

I spent 6 months on a "move existing code to different environment" project. Maybe 3 days of it was code changing, the rest was meetings and "engaging" other teams and getting misinformation and basically having to figure out everything myself, or interested parties like the integration people who have to deliver to clients helping figure it out.

At some point, every company moves to short-term cost reductions instead of focusing on maintaining infrastructure for when things pick up again. The first clue you're in trouble is when they fire smart people because they are too expensive. Then the remainder of the smart people see what's happening and jump ship. The few who remain struggle to keep everything afloat, only to get laid off when the company gets bought/merged.

If your potential employer already had its IPO, you're in danger. If it has ever bought another company, you're closer to danger. Short-term planning is responsible for some of the most soul-draining policies and requirements ever to offend humanity by their very existence.

Megacorps

[Rycross]

I'm actually a bit surprised at the almost-uniformly negative response to "mega corps." I've worked at two companies that could be described as "mega corps." The first, while not exactly soul-crushing, bore such a striking resemblance to Office Space that I was happy to leave. The other one has been an almost-uniformly pleasant experience, with a solid focus on tech and very little bureaucracy. What I've taken away from this is that you can't judge the quality of a job by the size of the company.

As far as the 60-hours-per-week thing goes, both jobs had me firmly in the 40-45 hours range. The lone, very rare exceptions (50-55 hour weeks) were solely due to my own fuckups, and my desire to not have my fuckups impact the rest of my team (as in, they're actual people who didn't deserve to look bad because of something I did). I've never been forced to work long hours.

On the topic of overtime, I've found that mentioning "quality of life" and "no mandatory overtime" in interviews will get you dropped like a hot-potato if the company in question actually does expect 60 hour weeks. I've made it a habit to ignore people telling me not to ask these things, and make sure to ask it in every interview. Tends to weed out the places I don't want to work.

I realize that my experiences may not be the norm, though.

Re:How? The better question is WHY?

[Kevin Stevens]

I agree completely. I have run the gamut, working at a 300k+ megacorp, 2 ~30k megacorps, a 1000 person firm, a 30 person firm, and an 8 man startup. Smaller is better in almost every way on a day to day basis. The bigger firms tend to have better benefits when it comes to things like 401k matching and vacation time, but thats pretty much where the benefits end.

Every small firm I have worked at, I have felt that I was more challenged, and did more meaningful work, and contributed to the bottom line in a direct, easily measurable way. The atmosphere is much more family-like, where you all depend on each other, and can bring your friends/family and often even your dog into the office without a problem (security polices at megacorp generally don't allow this, and if they do, you have to go through the hassle of signing them in, getting them visitors passes that they have to get photographed for, etc). My gf is in sales and would always stop in and say hello when she was in the area, and I knew my coworkers families, etc. Megacorp only has shitty free coffee for its employees and vending machines, every small firm I have worked at has had a well stocked kitchen with healthy and no so healthy snacks, drinks, and you could ask the office manager to buy anything within reason and she would, Ditto that on office supplies- want a whiteboard for your cube and have a hang up about only using uniball pens- not a problem, but at Megacorp, you will get whatever is standard issue in the supply closet, where they may actually lock it up and monitor you while get supplies.

Did you just read a blog post at Megacorp about google's sparse_hash hash map library and want to download it and try it out to see if it really delivers on its increased performance over your compiler's stl implementation? Well hold on there will rodger, if you are even allowed to get past websense and get to the download site, there will undoubtedly be restrictions on your ability to get the code into your local dev environment, and even it offers a 5x speed up in your app's most critical area, you are going to have a weeks long battle to get the library's use approved, and a large part of that will be convincing the "architect" whose nose has been up in the air so long he hasn't been able to read a technical book in the last 5 years, that it was his idea. Innovation doesn't come from the unanointed, didn't you get that memo? Meanwhile, over at the startup, I had the code integrated as soon as I verified it passed our unit tests.

Meanwhile, over in megacorp land, you just got an email about a ticket being opened speaking something about how some operations person in singapore can't get his pipes to work properly even though he bashes them properly and the script shell greps just fine and CUSTOMER IMPACT. The ticket has been opened for a week, and you can see xioahu ping was getting pissy and reassigned it to you because it was ignored by your coworker. Singapore is almost exactly 12 hours out of whack with your schedule, meaning your work hours don't overlap at all- looks like there is going to be some OT to get this worked out. Meanwhile, at the startup, the ops guy who makes sure the system hums just yells out to the sys admin to grant his process privileges to /var/log and the problem is resolved in under 3 minutes.

You are given a project at megacorp, and you think the db backend should be postgresql because you like its grown up transaction features and don't need all the crap from Oracle. However, policies at megacorp demand that you use one of their approved vendors that they already have a license for, and you have to talk to the DBA team to provision your database and push the paperwork for the appropriate chargebacks to be put in, and there is a 3 week lead time to get all the work done. Meanwhile, at the startup, you take a box with spare capacity, throw postgresql on it, and in a few hours you have a development server up and running and tell the admin to put in a purchase order for some DB servers.

You

Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance?

[Surt]

I don't know. We get a disturbing number of resumes claiming 20+ years of overall experience who can't seem to code their way out of a wet paper bag. No one on our interviewing team has found a way to distinguish those resumes from the people who are great.

Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance?

[dgatwood]

Explain quicksort? Seriously? That borders on cruel unless they're straight out of college. Those of you who have been out in the workplace more than ten years, raise your hand if you still remember how to write quicksort without looking it up. Heck, half the quicksort algorithms I see published in textbooks have an off-by-one error and don't even work. It's quite possibly the most frequently botched algorithm ever. And you want somebody to explain it cold? You are one sick [expletive deleted]. :-D

Besides, there's no useful reason to know quicksort unless you're applying for a job writing sort algorithms. For 99% of the programming jobs, all that really matters is that when you ask them what sorting algorithm they would use to sort a list of 10,000 items, they had better not say bubble sort or suggest implementing their own algorithm (which will invariably end up looking an awful lot like bubble sort). There are plenty of libraries out there for heapsort, quicksort, etc. that are so trivial to use that it makes knowledge of the algorithms at any depth largely unnecessary.

The purpose of teaching those algorithms is not to have people understand the algorithms themselves, but rather to serve as a gentle introduction into algorithmic complexity and the more broadly useful topics of binary trees and other link-structured data. Expecting people to memorize the details of a particular search algorithm is missing the whole point of why we learn about those algorithms in the first place.

Re:anyone noticed the snide arrogance?

[jcr]

Those of you who have been out in the workplace more than ten years, raise your hand if you still remember how to write quicksort without looking it up.

Actually, those kinds of questions are a great time-saver. I've been in the industry since 1982, and if an interviewer asks me how to describe quicksort, I'll tell him it's in volume 3 of Knuth. If that answer doesn't satisfy him, I'll stop the interview.

On the flip side, when I'm interviewing a candidate, I couldn't care less whether he's got the qsort algorithm memorized. What I want to know is whether he's experienced with the kinds of work we're doing, and whether he's capable of inventing a solution to a problem he hasn't seen before. Asking him to describe qsort is about as useful as asking him to recite all the state capitols.

-jcr

Re:Other words...

[Metasquares]

show a little independence

But not too much!